Author Archives: bhatt

Deniz Ozyildiz, invited speaker at WAFL 14 at MIT

Deniz Özyildiz gave an invited talk on `Unselected Embedded Questions‘ at the WAFL 14 conference that was held at MIT Oct. 19-21, 2018.

The full program can be found here: https://wafl14.mit.edu/program

An abstract of his talk follows.

Unselected embedded questions
In this talk, I focus on Turkish “unselected embedded questions” like in 1). Some of the entailments of 1) are given in a., b., and c.

1) Ali [ annesi geldi mi diye ] kapiyi acti.
Ali [ his.mother arrived PolQ say.C ] the.door opened
Ali opened the door in order to find out whether his mother had arrived.
a. Ali is entertaining the question “Has my mother arrived?”
b. Ali is agnostic about the answer to the question.
c. Ali opens the door with the purpose of finding the answer to the question.
These are puzzling because the embedded question apparently has no slot to fill in the syntax and in the semantics: The internal argument position of “open” is occupied by “the door” and a predicate like “open the door” does not express a relation that one has to questions or to propositions. The phenomenon occurs in a variety of Turkic languages, and also in languages like Japanese and Korean (Tomioka & Kim 2016, Kim 2018).
I argue that the subordinator “diye,” made up of the root de- (“to say”) and the conjunctive morpheme -(y)A, introduces a bleached attitude towards the embedded question, anchored to the matrix agent Ali. This attitude is then conjoined (roughly) with the matrix event of opening the door.
The account closely follows accounts of clausal subordination where the “attitude is coming from the embedded clause” (Bogal-Allbritten 2016, Kim 2018, Koopman & Sportiche 1989, Kratzer 2016, Moulton 2009, among many others). And has a variety of independently desirable consequences such as accounting for indexical shifting patterns under verbs of communicative reception (Özy?ld?z et al. 2018) and attitude sensitive complementizers in e.g., Laz (Demirok et al. 2018).

Graduation 2018

Jérémy Pasquereau, Amanda Rysling, and Shayne Sloggett received their PhD degrees as part of the May 2018 graduate commencement ceremony on May 11, 2018. Their advisors, Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer (Jérémy), John Kingston (Amanda), and Brian Dillon (Shayne) were there to hood them. Also at the ceremony were Lyn Frazier, Joe Pater, Alice Harris, Gaja Jarosz, Kyle Johnson and Caroline Andrews.

[In addition to the above students who `walked’ yesterday, the following students also received their PhD degrees yesterday: Michael Clauss, Jon Ander Mendia, Yangsook Park, and Ethan Poole.]

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Pete Alrenga in SuSurrus, Friday, April 13

Pete Alrenga will speak in SuSurrus on Friday, April 13 on being `single’. The exact time and location might shift a bit; right now we think it will be at 2.30pm in N-458. Watch your email for details.

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On being ‘single’:  From emphasis to exclusivity

Pete Alrenga

A well-known feature of the modifier ‘single’ is that it gives rise to two sorts of interpretations when it occurs in an indefinite noun phrase. In simple affirmative sentences, ‘single’ semantically conveys “no more than one”, and thus patterns with other exclusive modifiers in producing upper-bounded truth conditions. In NPI-licensing environments, ‘single’ fails to trigger such an inference, and instead has a purely emphatic effect. In these environments, ‘single’ patterns with scalar minimizers.

(1)    {A single, Only one} student came to my office yesterday. (#In fact, several of them did.)
(2)    John didn’t see {a single person, a soul} during his morning walk.

While uses of ‘single’ as in (2) have figured in the NPI literature, little attention has been paid to the use of ‘single’ in positive contexts, much less to the relation between the two uses illustrated in (1) and (2). In the first part of this talk, I develop a unified approach to these uses, one which takes their emphatic character as its starting point. In line with much recent work on NPIs, I account for this shared property via ‘single’’s mandatory association with the silent operator EVEN. This assumption derives its behavior in negative sentences like (2) straightaways. I further show that in positive sentences like (1), the semantic upper-bounding that ‘single’ produces can also be made to follow from its mandatory association with EVEN. In the second part of the talk, I consider some of the implications of this analysis for our understanding of scalar minimizers and exclusive modifiers more generally.

 

           

 

 

UMass at FASAL 8, Wichita State University, March 31, April 1, 2018

FASAL 8 [https://sites.google.com/view/fasal8/home] was held at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, on March 31 and April 1, 2018.

Sakshi Bhatia gave a talk on `Forgetting effects in Hindi” with Samar Husain [IIT Delhi].

Rajesh Bhatt gave a talk on “A secondary crossover effect in Hindi-Urdu” with Stefan Keine [USC].

 

UMass at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium 42, March 23-25, 2018

UMass had a very strong showing at the 42nd Penn Linguistics Colloquium which was held from March 23-25, 2018

The following talks were presented:

Rong Ying: “Perspectives under ellipsis”, work done with Jeremy Hartman

Petr Kusliy and Katia Vostrikova: “De Re attitude reports about disjunctive attitudes”

Petr Kusliy:  “Simultaneous present-under-past in relative clauses: Evidence from fronted VPs”;

Andrew Lamont: “Turkic nasal harmony as surface correspondence”, work done with Jonathan Washington;

Deniz Özyildiz: “Quantifier raising derives factivity and its prosody”;

Hsin-Lun Huang:     “Two types of preverbal movement and duration/frequency phrases in Mandarin Chinese”.

 

 

Sherry Hucklebridge designs and illustrates a video game for T???ch? Yat?ì revitalization

Sherry Hucklebridge has designed and illustrated a video game to help with the revitalization of T???ch? Yat?ì

Within the last decade, video games have emerged as powerful pedagogical tools, and they represent a promising avenue for language revitalization efforts. Eda`n? No ?ge`e Do ?ne Gok’e ??d`? (How Fox Saved the People) is a T???ch? Yat?ì video game based on the traditional T???ch? legend of the same name. In the game, players undertake a quest to recover the missing caribou, which have been stolen by Raven, in order to save the hungry people. This involves tasks such as navigating around the village, collecting firewood, and hunting and fishing, the completion of which relies on instructions presented inT???ch? Yat?ì.

But why a video game? Unlike other forms of media (i.e. video, audio, and text) video games require active, creative participation. The goal of this game is to stimulate sustained interest in learning through a combination of interactive storytelling, and the positive reinforcement that comes from achieving goal-oriented tasks. Because the narrative relies on core themes, key characters, and repeated actions, this allows players to build up a solid foundation of vocabulary and simple sentence structure through repeated use. Furthermore, the game provides opportunities for learning in-context, creating settings that must be navigated using T???ch?  linguistic and cultural knowledge.

Here is a link to the CBC Northbeat video — the discussion of the game appears around minute 14:
http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1187183171977

 

A more detailed description can be found here: video_game_for_revitalization

 

Caroline Andrews in Syntax Workshop, March 30, 2.30pm

Caroline Andrews led the discussion for Colin Philips colloquium talk on March 30 in the syntax workshop that immediately preceded the colloquium.

Title: Speaking, understanding, and grammar

Abstract:
We speak and understand the same language, but it’s generally assumed that language production and comprehension are subserved by separate cognitive systems. So they must presumably draw on a third, task-neutral cognitive system (“grammar”). For this reason, comprehension-production differences are a thorn in the side of anybody who might want to collapse grammar and language processing mechanisms (i.e., me!).  In this talk I will explore two linguistic domains from the perspective of comprehension and production. In the case of syntactic categories, I will show that the same underlying mechanisms can have rather  different surface effects in comprehension and production. In the case of argument role information, I will show an apparent conflict between comprehension and production. In production, argument role information tightly governs the time course of speech planning. But in comprehension, initial prediction mechanisms seem to be blind to argument role information. I argue that both the similarities and contrasts can be captured under a view in which the same cognitive architecture is accessed based on different information, i.e., sounds for comprehension, messages for production. I will discuss the relation between this and other ways of thinking about comprehension-production relations, drawing on a combination of behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

If anyone wanted to glance at some papers, the links to the ones he recommended are here:

Katia Vostrikova at SuSurrus at 2.15pm, Friday April 7, N400

Speaker: Ekaterina Vostrikova (UMass-Amherst),
Title: Clausal and Phrasal Exceptives
When: Friday, April 6, 2:15
Where: ILC N400
==========================================
Clausal and phrasal exceptives
Exceptive constructions in English, like (1), come with the following
inferences: John is a boy and he did not come, every other boy came (Horn
1989, von Fintel 1994).
(1) Every boy except John came.
Exceptives are never compatible with existential quantifiers (2).
(2) The distribution puzzle: *Some boy(s) except John came
Von Fintel’s (1994) theory of exceptives straightforwardly accounts for all of
these facts. According to this theory, “except” introduces a set ({John} in
(1)) that it subtracts from the domain of a quantifier and adds the minimality
condition: this is the minimal set that has to be subtracted in order for the
quantificational claim to be true.
However, it has been argued in the literature that complements of some
exceptive markers are reduced clauses (Garcia Alvarez 2008, Pérez-Jiménez
& Moreno-Quibén 2012 on Spanish, Soltan 2016 on Arabic) and thus do not
introduce a set of individuals.
In this talk I will show how von Fintel’s semantics for exceptives can be extended to clausal exceptives.

Jyoti Iyer on `Adjuncts’ in Recife, Brazil, March 23, 2018

Iyer in Brazil!

On Friday 23 March 2018, Jyoti Iyer gave a talk entitled, “The presuppositional objects of restitutive ‘again'”, at the III GETEGRA International Workshop (on Adjuncts) in Recife, Brazil. GETEGRA stands for Grupo de Estudos em Teoria da Gramática, a research group composed of professors, graduate students and undergrads from universities in the Northeast of Brazil.

The presentations were of high quality and spanned many areas. Here are almost all of them (first two invited).

– Jairo Nunes: Optional edge features (EF) which can drive A’ movement, and which languages can choose to place either on the wh-word itself [Eng.], or on the phase head [Braz. Port.]; implications for adjunct control via movement.
– Artemis Alexiadou: Crosslinguistic means of forming diminuitives, with a focus on languages which realise the morphology as a feature-changing little n head (gender, mass/count, declension class).
– Hedde Zeijlstra: A Merged element can project a label only if it retains an unchecked uF. Adjuncts like adverbs are [uV][V], so lose [uV] when Merged with [V]. Extends to PP adjuncts too.
– Chiara Dal Farra: Some adjuncts allow more movement out of them, some less. Some of the more opaque ones are so because they are parenthetical. [Italian]
– Tonjes Veenstra: Coordination in serial verb constructions as adjunction, and an argument for Pair Merge. [Mauritian Creole]
– Ana Regina Calindro: Explaining the “beneficiary” reading of NP+PP distransitives using i* as a recursive argument-introducing head. [Braz. Port.]
– Violeta Demonts: An argument for the sideward movement theory of control, from dispositional evaluative adjectives in Spanish [Juan was intelligent in accept that job], where John doesn’t have to be intelligent in general.
– Janayna Carvalho: Null pronominals in Braz. Port. [in.the house of.the Mary EC sell.3sg sweet] as Diesing-indefinites closed off by locative PP.
– Carlos Muñoz Pérez: Parasitic gaps do not reconstruct. Explaining this via a hierarchy of choices of nominal elements to posit in the gap – Minimize Restrictors! makes sure you cannot reconstruct anything too redundant.
– Jyoti Iyer; Restitutive readings impose a ban on narrow scope of the object being restored. Deriving this by restriction result-state predication to nominals of type <e>.

[Full program with abstracts here: https://adjuncts.wixsite.com/adjuncts2018/call-for-papers]

Official pictures here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BgqsqDUHXkx/?taken-by=getegra [Iyer]
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bgvrx5JHsv-/?taken-by=getegra [group]